According to legend, the late, great Sidney Morgenbesser, professor of philosophy at Columbia University (and as New York’s “sidewalk Socrates,” a source of many unforgettable anecdotes), once gave an exam to a class consisting of just one question: “Some people think Marx and Freud went too far. How far would you go?” (Alas, the students’ answers have not been preserved.) What a teacher, and what a classroom moment for the ages! With one stroke, it tells us the real purpose of higher education: to pursue truth all on your own.
Morgenbesser’s question is perfect because it puts students in the driver’s seat. Those great thinkers are not just over there on a shelf, or in the dusty pages of a book (or, these days, in the gleaming fonts of a Wikipedia entry). Instead, they’re inviting you to decide if you agree with them, and to keep in mind that agreeing with them means sticking your neck out—changing the way you think and, as a result, maybe even your life.
Morgenbesser was giving his class the most important imperative that a teacher can supply: Rather than just saying “That sounds too radical for me” or “I think those ideas are kind of extreme,” tell me exactly how far you would go and why—no false caution or superficial daring allowed. Imagine yourself redesigning society like Marx, or explaining human passions and behavior like Freud. What would you do differently from them? (If you don’t believe society should be changed, you have to defend that, too.)
Challenges like Morgenbesser’s are rare, in fact almost invisible these days in the humanities—not that they were ever common. The reason can be summed up in two words: cultural studies.
The original motive for cultural studies was a good one: to try to understand the ways we think and act based on the influences that surround us, our culture. Yet a problem arose almost from the start. What is our surrounding culture? Is it Lost and Breaking Bad, the iPhone and Stephen Colbert, Twitter and Facebook? I’m rather fond of Breaking Bad and Colbert (the others I could live without), but I find it hard to think of them as governing influences in my life. Cultural studies may have begun with a broader emphasis on social life, but these days it spends much of its time focusing on the products we enjoy, and assumes that those products shape our thinking.
But how a person sees the world depends on what she believes, not what she consumes. Culture is like the air; we take it in because we have to, because it’s there. But it’s not nearly as decisive in telling us who we are, as many these days think it is. It’s well nigh impossible to deduce someone’s beliefs from the ambient culture: Belief is an individual matter. Our teachers prefer to argue in favor of culture’s constraints on us, rather than seeing how someone comes to a personal belief, often against the dictates of culture. And so they have lost sight of the true meaning of education—its power to change lives.
Cultural studies insists that we aren’t as autonomous as we think we are, that we’re ruled by forces beyond our control. But what happens in the classroom, if it’s a real classroom, disproves this point: Students and teachers give themselves the power to decide what they really think, rather than just signing on to the ideas that surround them, or nodding assent to what they’re supposed to believe. And by figuring out what they think, students become different people, right there in the classroom. This sort of life-altering change is what the best teachers aim for. Some of them are still around; maybe you’ve been in their classes yourself. If you haven’t, you’ve missed out on the most vital and urgent gift that college can offer you.
Many complain that the humanities have become jargon-infested jungles of heavy theory, with little regard for common sense or clear, elegant expression. That is, to be sure, a significant problem. But it’s not the main problem. Yes, fashionable theorists write obscurely—dare one say it, badly—and they seem to belabor points that, outside the classroom, might seem irrelevant. But that was true of Kant and Hegel as well, and they changed the world.
The issue is not books themselves, but how they’re being used. The biggest obstacle to humanistic education in the 21st century is that books, whether theory or not, have become tools for making predictable references to big concepts (capitalism, gender, modernity) rather than what they should be, guides to life. Mark Edmundson has remarked that most teachers apply theories like paint to the side of a house: a little Marx here, a little Foucault there. They don’t urge us to take these thinkers seriously, to imagine living in the world as Marx or Foucault described it.
Do you really believe with Marx that humans are Homo economicus, and that class struggle makes history happen? Or with Foucault that the self is a mere phantom, the product of an impersonal disciplinary regime? What would you do differently if you thought those things were true? How could you live a life informed by such ideas? Theories are not a tool kit but a way of seeing the world. And if education is not concerned with how we see the world, it’s failing us, neglecting its most important mission.
For decades now, humanities departments have trumpeted the notion that cultural assumptions control our existence. When I read a Shakespeare play with my students, it’s often hard to make them let go of the idea that “what people thought in those days” is a reliable guide to interpretation. In Shakespeare’s era, they tell me, women were oppressed, their desires for independence constantly crushed. Yet, I remind my class, the plot of King Lear is ruled by powerful female politicians; Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia are no slouches in either the council room or the battlefield. A quick ride through Montaigne’s lusty, iconoclastic essay “On Some Verses of Virgil” cures students of the notion that female superiority was unthinkable during the Renaissance.
The power to use books to redefine their lives is being taken away from our students. They are generally taught to label and categorize and to sign on to the conventional wisdom—not to try to figure out whether what a writer says is true or not, but to give that writer a neatly limited place in cultural history. Every day, in hundreds of colleges and universities, students are told that modernity is fundamentally Cartesian. They learn that, for modern thinkers in the wake of Descartes, knowledge is the result of a well-thought-out method, and a clear, unbiased intellect leads you toward the truth—until postmodernism comes along to tear the epistemological house down. But how often do we ask students whether they would prefer to live like Cartesians (rather than, say, postmodernists or Romantics, or Jane Austenites or Emersonians)?
Such questions aren’t put to a class very often, because most teachers assume that we have no choice: that an age imposes its ideology on us; that we can perhaps struggle against or critique a culture, but can never really escape from it.
But those who believe that are wrong, as anyone who has ever experienced a religious, political, or philosophical conversion could tell you. Growing up means choosing a picture of the world that you think is the right one, as well as figuring out what kind of life you want to have. Deciding that the world is, or should be, this way rather than that is the outcome of a personal struggle, and our universities ought to be pitching in on behalf of that struggle. We as teachers must challenge students to decide what they want the world, and their own lives, to be—not just tell them to describe the cultural materials that are lying around us.
Taking reading seriously—looking at a book not merely as an illustration of its author’s culture but as wisdom literature, a message about how to live—means making value judgments: Can this novel or film or poem change the way you look at your life? If it can’t, it’s not worth serious attention.
Students shouldn’t be asked to read hundreds of pages of a literary work to gain a fuller picture of the ideology or customs of any era, especially their own. The benefit of great literature is not in its ability to give information. The justly forgotten Thomas Dekker tells us more about early modern English life than Shakespeare does, but there are a thousand reasons why we would rather read Shakespeare.
Lionel Trilling famously lamented that, when he held his students’ heads over the modernist abyss, they lacked the sense of life-threatening urgency he wanted to instill in them. They would respond, “Yeah, the abyss—that’s pretty interesting.” Now the characteristic student response is, “People in the early 20th century talked a lot about the abyss; it had something to do with late capitalism, I think.” The rampant insistence that history tells us what to think has flattened out our intellectual options. But the abyss is still there, waiting, if we dare to take it personally.
All is not lost. Whenever a teacher steps inside a classroom, she can decide to see the book she presents to the class as an intimate challenge rather than just another chance to theorize about culture.
I remember teaching Nietzsche’s Toward the Genealogy of Morals some years ago. One of the students, a freshman, came up to me after class and told me that if she continued reading Nietzsche’s book, she would have to question everything she had ever believed. (Ah, yes, I thought to myself, we scored, Nietzsche and I.) She said this a little nervously, but with pride, too: She had decided to keep reading. She was right to be proud, for she had discovered the only real reason to read a book—to shake up, and perhaps to transform, your life.
David Mikics is a professor of English at the University of Houston, a columnist for the online magazine Tablet, and the author, most recently, of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, published this month by Harvard University Press’s Belknap Press.